Goa Book Club will have its next meeting on Saturday June 23, 2012 at 5 pm at the Broadway Book Centre, Panjim (on 18th June Road, near Raga and Rock/Pharmacy College).
Kenya-based Blanche D'Souza and the author of "Harnessing the Trade Winds" (c/o phone +91-832-2272733) will be our special guest, and speak on her book. Please do come. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * -- Africa, India, trade and a Goan author Frederick Noronha Robert S Newman, the anthropologist from Marblehead, MA. who has written quite a bit on Goa, calls our region "a land of migration and exile". It has been so for centuries. In some of his other writings, he has suggested that Goa has among the highest out-migration levels in the world. In view of this, it is surprising how little attention is given to Goa's links with the outside world. Or, even the doings of the diaspora in different pockets all over. Small niche publications, like the online Goan Voice UK [http://www.goanvoice.org.uk] run by retired UCL London engineering librarian Eddie Fernandes do a good job of this though. Former Xavier Centre of Historical Research librarian Maria Lilia 'Bunota' D'Souza shared with me the other day a book authored by someone she knows. 'Harnessing the Trade Winds' is a Goan-authored book, though its focus is not just tiny Goa, but rather the wider canvas of understanding the millennia-old trade links between India and East Africa. Blanche Rocha D'Souza subtitles her book "the story of the centuries-old Indian trade with East Africa using the monsoon winds". D'Souza grew up as a child in Kenya, where her father was district cashier. She studied in Karachi and Mumbai, trained as a teacher, learnt library science in Kenya, was senior cataloguer at the US Library of Congress and later graduated in social psychology. Quite a global migrant even in the Goan scheme of things! Her 204-page Kenya-published book (ISBN 9966712321) , coming from Zand Graphics at Nairobi, is unfortunately not easily available in Goa. Mine is a borrowed copy. Which is a pity, because it is both interesting and informative. D'Souza joins the small but dedicated rank of people who have cut against the silence, and taken on the task of chronicling the history of Goan migration globally. There have been others like Stella Mascarenhas-Keyes (wish her work was published in Goa), J.B.Pinto of Saligao who wrote in the 1960s, Teresa Albuquerque (who earlier focussed on the Goans of Kenya and, indirectly, of Bombay) among others. If you're wondering what the 'trading wings' are all about, read this quote from the National Geographic, August 1999, which features at the start of Chapter 15: "Around 120 BC, members of the Egyptian Coast Guard found an Indian sailor shipwrecked on the Red Sea. "They took him to Ptolemy VII. The sailor spoke a language that no one in Alexandria knew, so Ptolemy ordered that the sailor be taught Greek. "Thus educated, the sailor taught his captors something amazing; the Monsoons over the Indian Ocean blow in a regular pattern -- from northeast to southwest in winter, an dthe opposite direction in summer." The Trade Winds are the most consistent wind system on earth, we're told. Evidence suggests Indians made voyages across the open sea to East Africa "from antiquity" while Malays used the ocean currents to reach Madagascar. This small band has been focussing on the many tens of thousands who have migrated out of Goa over the centuries. Obviously, such a small number of researchers is not sufficient. With India finally waking up to the potential of its expats -- tiny Goa should have been at this point decades ago -- one hopes much such studies come to light. Of course, we know that there are others working on this topic right now. But more on that when it actually happens. In eighteen (mostly short) chapters, D'Souza goes into quite some depth to trace links you'd never suspect even existed. Her background in librarian science obviously gives her an edge in collating such a wide range of facts. It covers themes like the early Indian Ocean trade, Indians in East Africa, Indian equations with various foreign powers (British, Arabs, Portuguese), the Indian trader, the "indentured Indian", the Uganda railway, and the trading winds. Surely, one of the contentious chapters would be the one dealing with Indians and the slave trade. D'Souza refers to tracks such as African slaves here, the fact that the Muslim king of Gaur in Bengal (1459-1474) had some eight thousand slaves, and the influx of Abyssinian (Ethiopian) and other East Africans into western India in the fifth century. India, she says, could have not been unaware of the slave trade, since they "exercised such a predominant influence over East African trade". D'Souza goes on to say that Indians were indirectly implicated in the slave trade "inasmuch as Indian merchant capital was financing both movements, in and out of the interior of Africa, where manufactured goods found their way into the interior to be exchanged for slaves and ivory." But, she suggests, British explorers (like Dr Livingstone) tried to "implicate" Indians in the slave trade -- perhaps more than responsible for it. D'Souza argues that there is no slavery in the Hindu concept of slavery. "There was no need for slaves, since the Hindu caste system with its distinct divisions of labour took care of all aspects of the job market," she writes. Goans, who have an East Africa link, and this is not a small number, would find specially interesting D'Souza focus on the Indians and the Portuguese, the Uganda Railway, and the sprinkling of references throughout the book. References to the Dr. Ribeiro Goan School, and Pio Gama Pinto come up early in the preface to this book itself. There are (at least) eight references to Goa in the index, and another five to Goans. Not surprising, considering the author's interest and her interests. All in all, an interesting title for reasons more than just the origins of the author. Towards the end of the book, D'Souza focuses on the plants that Asia took across to Africa, amidst many other topics. Besides the onion (which, she says specifically, came from Goa), there are also a number of trees (coconut palm, jackfruit, guava, mango, tamarind, cashew), grains (millet, rice, wheat, sorghum, simsim and sesame). Fruits from India that reached Africa include sweet and bitter oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruit, papaya, Indian figs, bananas, pomegranates and pineapples. There are also a number of vegetables, legumes, root plants, medicinal plants (camphor, neem and tulsi) and cash crops (sugarcane, cotton, rice). In the blurb, her book is described interestingly: "Blanche D'Souza's book is a most direct statement on 'brown man's' transcripts over thousands of years of trade, labour and migration for settlements against a deep backdrop of Arab, British and Portuguese rivalries in the Indian Ocean." We could certainly do with more of these. -- Frederick Noronha can be contacted on 2409490 (after 2 pm) or SMS 9822122436. This review was published some time ago in the Gomantak Times.
